Truth poll

[ciphergoth]

I should really post this on a Monday but I might as well do it now. A whole bunch of assertions to do with truth that it occurred to me to poll about...

[Poll #1365485]

Comments

[andrewducker]

There _is_ such a thing as Truth, but it only exists out there in the real world, and have access only to models of it created through analysis of our sense impressions.

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

What he said.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

2nded.

In a way that pretty much sums up my dissertation at uni :oP

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's enough for me - it means that it makes sense to speak of the accuracy of a model, that there's something to compare it to.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

I find this (the division between objective reality and our models of it) a useful model for many purposes, but I'm not willing to call it a capital-T Truth. (I mean, how would you know?)

I'm essentially a pragmatist.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

Funny, I'd say the opposite: Truth only truly exists in the mathematical world. The real world has too many complexities, inconsistencies and shades of gray.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

But if you look at the history of mathematics you'll see that it's riddled with errors and inconsistencies. And we only adopt definitions because they're useful or because we find them useful. How can that be "Truth"?

[keirf.livejournal.com]

replace second "useful" with "interesting" in the previous statement.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I didn't say mathematics in general was true; I said that truth existed within the mathematical world. The history of mathematics is a history of striving to reach the truth. There may be many failures, but mathematics without the concept of truth as an absolute wouldn't get very far.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

There are other viewpoints in the philosophy of mathematics than the Platonistic "there is an absolute truth" that you're putting forward.

There's the Formalist approach - "It's just a game where we select the rules and see where they lead us", which begs the question what the process behind adopting the rules is, and leaves "truth" as a rather empty and hollow concept.

Another major one is Quasi-Empiricism. If you read and take onboard "Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos (the Kuhn of mathematics) then mathematics is about the history of striving to move away from falsity, rather than a move towards an absolute truth. Again, if all we can do is detect falsity, but we can't ever know if we've reached truth then the concept of "absolute truth" doesn't have much bearing on the subject.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I was actually making my statements from a formalist point of view. The Platonic view of mathematics seems like a bundle of unwarranted assumptions.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of mathamatics as just another mentally constructed model of the universe myself.

I do believe it gives us access to 'Truth' (the world beyond our models) but it is still only part of a representation of truth rather than a part of the 'Truth' in itself.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

If we only have access to "Truth with a capital T" through inaccurate models filtered through analysis of our sense impressions, then how can we know that it's actually there and that it's absolute?

[andrewducker]

My theory is that to things are possible:
1) My mind is not actually accessing anything through sense impression - it's just making shit up (or having made-up shit fed to it). In which case the only thing I can know is that my mind itself exists (cogito ergo sum).
2) The sense impressions I get _are_ from an outside world, but are imperfect.

In either caee the mind itself exists. And has some form or other that is 'actually' doing something. In the latter case I can examine my sense impressions, compare them with the sense impressions of others, design experiments, and test this outside world.

Either things happen, or they don't. I may, or may not, experience them in any way like they actually happen, but _something_ is clearly happening. And that something is The Truth of the universe - the actual event/shape of it.

Option (1) is always possible (and some would say it's statisitcally likely for any one obersver), but even in that case, recurse down the simulations far enough and you'll find the actual universe, wherein something is going on.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Case 1 is just a special case of 2 in which the "something" is your mind. But in case 2 isn't there the possibility that you can recurse down infinitely, in which case where is your Truth? Or what if we had some hypothetical way of observing the actual universe, but it changed every time it was observed - what happens to Truth then?

[andrewducker]

Or what if we had some hypothetical way of observing the actual universe, but it changed every time it was observed - what happens to Truth then?

This does seem to be the case with the actual universe - and it just means that that's part of The Truth.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

If Truth is something that may or may not be consistent and complete, or even rational, and in any case we can't observe it or if we can we can't know that we have then I don't see much point to it other than a historical part of philosophy. It's kind of up there with phlogiston and the ether.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

My line on (the overwhelming majority of) Matrix/brain-in-a-vat/universe-simulation arguments is that they're worse than useless. They're not even wrong, as the phrase goes. They make absolutely no observable difference to the world as we can experience it. By definition.

(The same's sometimes true of some people's conception of God, but often only when you've backed them in to a corner in an argument.)

I'm really pretty convinced that the weaker versions of those arguments (where extraordinary intervention sometimes happens) are also false. I'd be open to evidence of those, but it'd need to be pretty damn good evidence. If Laurence Fishburn and Hugo Weaving starting showing me wacky stuff, my first guess would be they were messing with my head alone, rather than with the fabric of the universe.

[andrewducker]

They make absolutely no observable difference to the world as we can experience it. By definition.

Or at least not observable difference...so far!

To be honest, the simulation argument is one that I mostly store at the back of my brain, only coming out when discussing the nature of reality. It's there, along with The God Hypothesis, as an example of something that cannot be ruled out, and makes for fun fiction, but doesn't actually affect my day-to-day life in the slightest.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

Right, that's exactly why Platonism is cobblers.